Friday, February 15, 2013

"And I’m sure that’s how she’d want to be remembered. For her tits."

The Sun Newspaper has taken what it calls in an internal leaked memorandum “A bold opportunity to take journalism kicking and screaming into the 21st century” in its new editorial stance of no longer referring to women by anything but details about their physical appearance.

Sun Editor Dominic Mohan, in an interview with Jeremy Vine on Radio 2, explained the reasoning behind this mandate.

Sun Editor Dominic Mohan

“Our typical reader is the man on the street. And it’s a basic given fact that, if you’re a bird, the man on the street doesn’t give a monkeys about your qualifications, your achievements or your struggles. He’s only really bothered about two things. Whether you’re legally old enough to have sex and how big your tits are. And if you aren’t legally old enough to have sex, how long the readership will have to wait before they can fancy you without any trace of guilt.”

“Oh, and if you used to be a bloke.”

“It takes time to research the names of any women we write articles on – and it’s a journalistic fact that the more we have to write names, the greater the risk that spelling mistakes will occur. We toyed with the idea of replacing the name of every woman with their vital statistics, but a large percentage of our readership would simply confuse those with birthdates.”

“Let’s take Ariva Sternkamp – Sternkam – Steenkamp, whatever her name was. I think you get the point I'm making - what does it matter what her name was? Girlfriend of Oscar Pistorius, that disabled olympic bloke. Our readers don’t care about her human rights work or her boring campaigning – they’re more concerned about her legs and her tits. Dead or not, she looks bloody great in a bikini and our front page emphasised that. And I’m sure that’s how she’d want to be remembered. For her tits.”

“By removing the name from the equation, we simplify the news dramatically. We’ve been subtly reducing women to nothing more than objects to be gawped and pawed at as masturbatory objects of desire for years now, so this seems like the logical next step.”